Among the various points of contact between Portuguese and Italian design culture in the XX century is a shared interest in “minor” architecture. Giuseppe Pagano’s 1936 research on Architettura rurale italiana and the Portuguese Inquérito, proposed by architect Keil do Amaral in 1947, realized in 1956, and published in 1961 under the title Arquitectura Popular em Portugal, both demonstrate a common responsibility toward the rural traditions of their respective countries. This essay aims to explore affinities and differences between these two investigations. While Pagano’s work serves as an “influential model for Portuguese research”, the Inquérito takes a step further. Twenty years earlier, Pagano’s operation emerged as a response to the academism of the XIX century, seeking modern architecture’s values in the rural tradition. The Inquérito, on the other hand, takes place in the 1950s, where the most dangerous academism is now that of the “modern formalists” who have forgotten that early twentieth-century architecture was born in opposition to that of the past “drawing solutions from the concreteness of phenomena” and not from “an aprioristically determined cipher”. The two investigations, absorbed at different times, would become the basis for the architectural research in the 1950s in both Italy and Portugal, balancing modernity and tradition.